My first scientific study: Anti-cancer effects of CortiNon+

After more than 9 months of dealing with scientific bureaucracy, publishing politics, carefully crafting wording to avoid “rocking the boat”, and of course the “minor” issues of funding a study with personal income, I am pleased to present the two publications below (one of them co-authored by me). Namely, the results of both an in-vitro and an in-vivo study about the effects of our product CortiNon+ on the initiation and progression of a blood cancer in hamsters. The cancer in question is the so-called Graffi Murine Leukemia (GML) – a type of murine leukemia caused by a virus. The reason this type of cancer was chosen for the study is that the cancer is known to be 100% transplantable, 100% lethal, and with no known cases of spontaneous regression. The former means that the cancer is known to develop in 100% of the virus-treated animals (usually after a single injection), and the other two features are self-explanatory. There is no known cure and even the most successful treatments do not result in more than 20% increase in survival compared to an untreated group. As such, any benefit against this cancer displayed by the administration of a substance would be considered a significant scientific achievement.

What is CortiNon+? It has essentially the same ingredients as the regular CortiNon but the “+” version contains a progesterone:DHEA ratio of 8:1 instead of 3:1. Why such higher ratio? Well, it is based on a recent human study that found reversal of immune system aging (thymus atrophy) as a result of DHEA administration. In my post about that study, I also discussed several older studies demonstrating potent effects of progesterone on reversing thymus atrophy. The doses used in those studies have a HED in the range of 80mg-120mg daily. Considering the physiological DHEA doses that can help reverse thymus atrophy are in the 5mg-15mg range that suggests a 8:1 ratio of progesterone:DHEA should be able to replicate the studies with both DHEA and progesterone. In other words, CortiNon+ is expected to have a beneficial effect when it comes to thymus aging/atrophy and as such a positive effect on the immune system. The development of tumors as a result of viral inoculations depends heavily on immune system function, so I conjectured that it would be a good idea to investigate the effects of CortiNon+ on GML in hamsters and thus confirm/reject its immunomodulary and anti-aging effects.

The reason there are 2 publications is that the first one is a type of an in-vitro study, based on a spectral analysis of the plasma of animals treated with CortiNon+ and/or the tumor virus. Based on the works of Dr. Ling, Dr. Pollack, and Dr. Peat’s writings we now know that water inside the cell exists in a special state – i.e it is highly structured and very much unlike the (bulk) water that exists outside the organism. Healthy organisms are known to maintain the structure of said water while in sick organisms the water inside their cells and blood resembles more the bulk water found elsewhere in nature. This phenomenon is most readily visible in disease like cancer. Based on the difference of water structure between sick/healthy organisms it has been postulated that substances that increase the structure of intracellular water would have a beneficial effects while ones that decrease intracellular water structure would have detrimental effects on health. Progesterone is a good example of the former and estrogen a good example of the latter.

While searching for people who would be willing to perform the study with our product CortiNon+ I found a group of researchers at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (BAS) that are keenly aware of the work on water structure by the trio mentioned above. Moreover, the BAS group seem to have extended the idea of structured water (EZ water, in Pollack terms) mentioned above and has identified that specific degrees of water structure are associated with specific health effects. That group has developed a method for measuring the degree of structure in water, whether bulk or obtain from an organism. That method consists of essentially measuring the energy spectrum of hydrogen bonds formed by water molecules in a given sample. For people interested in reading more about the method, please see Section 3.2 of the BAS publication from 2018. According to the BAS team, there are several “peaks” along the energy spectrum of those hydrogen bonds that correspond to specific health effects – anti-inflammatory, anti-tumor, immunomodulatory, promoting neurological health, etc. So, by measuring the change of energy spectrum of hydrogen bonds in the water inside an organism treated with a specific chemical and comparing it to the water energy spectrum of a control organism, the team can anticipate what health effects the substance will have in-vivo. This is basically what the first publication below discusses in regards to the anticipated effects of CortiNon+. One striking finding of the study was that pre-treatment of one of the animal groups with CortiNon+ for seven (7) days results in a higher resilience to development of tumors compared to the control (healthy) group. In other words, pre-treatment with CortiNon+ is expected to have strong preventive effects on tumor development compared to even healthy organisms without any treatment. This exactly what was seen in the in-vivo study, which supports the validity of the water-structure analysis model developed by the people at BAS.

“…The influence of CortiNon+ on the development of Graffi tumor implanted in hamsters is assessed. The results show restructuring of water molecules in clusters with distribution that influences beneficially hamster (and human) health on molecular and cellular level. The results from the application of NES and DENS spectrums and mathematical models confirm the effects of CortiNon+ on the nervous and endocrine systems, and anti-inflammatory and anti-tumor effects, as well. One interesting observation is that higher effect from the application of CortiNon+ on the tumor-bearing hamsters from Gr. 1 that have been treated 7 days before the injection is obtained relative to even the result of healthy hamsters from Gr. 4”

The second publication (of which I am a co-author) describes the results of the in-vivo experiment using CortiNon+ on hamsters inoculated with GML virus. As can be seen from the graphs inside the study, pre-administration of CortiNon+ for 7 days before viral inoculation resulted in striking protective effects against the development of tumors. Namely, in the 7-day pre-treatment CortiNon+ group not only did ALL the animals require multiple injections to develop a tumor, but one animal required multiple daily injections for 19 days before it could develop a tumor! In contrast, 40% of the untreated animals developed tumors after a single injection, and the other 60% developed tumors over the next 5 days. This confirms the predictions of the model of water structure change described above – namely, the animals pre-treated with CortiNon+ for just 7 days became highly resilient to the development of a tumor with no known prevention and no known cure.

“…This study used an animal cancer model based on the Graffi solid tumor, a type of murine myeloid tumor. The experimental Graffi solid tumor is maintained in vivo in hamsters on a monthly basis from the research team at IEMPAM – BAS [4] via subcutaneous (s.c.) transplantation of live tumor cells (1-2.106) in the area of the back. Between days 7 and 15 after transplantation tumors appeared at the spot of injection, growing progressively, and hamsters died 30-35 days after the injection. For this tumor model 100% transplantability of tumor and 100% mortality rate have been observed. Spontaneous regression, i.e. spontaneous shrinking and disappearance of the tumor has not been reported [4].”

“…The results obtained in the current in vivo experiments show that the oral administration of CortiNon+ in hamsters with experimental Graffi myeloid tumor demonstrates a positive effect on the biometric parameters of tumor growth, namely increasing the tumor latency period up to 19 days, slowing-down the tumor growth, delaying mortality and increasing the median and individual survival in the treated groups compared to the untreated one. Also, the blood parameters have been influenced showing differences between the two experimental groups and control one. The results also give information that CortiNon+ acts as an immunomodulatory agent, raising the production of lymphocyte blood count on the 10th and 20th days for Gr1 and Gr2 compared to control – Gr3. Nevertheless, all the animals died. Thus, the antitumor effect of CortiNon+ needed explanation. We presumed that it might be associated with different levels of activation – non-selective immunomodulating activity (unpublished data), optimization of the oxidant-antioxidant balance, cytotoxic action on tumor cells by an apoptotic way [9,14] and etc. Recent evidence has also demonstrated that membrane progesterone receptors (mPRs) mediate most of the non-classical progesterone actions Valadez-Cosmes [16].”

“…The food supplement CortiNon+ is a combination of the steroids progesterone (Pr) and dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA). A series of studies have shown that sex steroids exert a wide spectrum of pharmacological effects [6,7,8,17,11,13,16,18,19]. In the skin tumor model in mice, DHEA treatment inhibits tumor initiation, as well as tumor promoter-induced epidermal hyperplasia and promotion of papillomas [13]. Pharmacological doses of DHEA exhibit chemopreventive and anti-proliferative effects on malignant human cancer cell lines and some tumors in experimental animals. The growth of HepG2 and HT-29 cancer cells was significantly inhibited by DHEA, in a dose-and time-dependent manner [8,17,20]. Progesterone (Pr) containing compounds have been extensively used in the treatment of patients with early, advanced or recurrent endometrial cancer Francis et al. [18], Montz et al., [20]. Cytostatic and cytotoxic activities of sex steroids were also evaluated in vitro against ten human leukemia/lymphoma cell lines [6]. The influence of Pr on the autoimmune, infectious and malignant diseases via Pr-receptors (adaptive and innate immune effects) is examined in human leukemia [7,8]. We first in the scientific literatureexamined the influence of CortiNon+, a progesterone and dehydroepiandrosterone containing compound on the model of experimentally induced myeloid Graffi tumor in hamsters, evaluating that the treatment has a positive effect on tumor appearance and growth, and improves survival rate of tumor-bearing animals.”